She missed her bus stop.
It wasn't the first time a dead man had messed up her commute, but it was the first time one had done it via bad handwriting.
"Ah, feck," Saoirse blurted, jamming the bell too late. The bus trundled past her office stop and only wheezed to a halt at the next one.
She scrambled down the stairs, notebook clutched to her chest, rain already needling the windows.
The driver gave her a sympathetic look. "Lost in your thoughts, love?"
"In someone else's," she said, thinking of the cramped, underlined script at the back of Collins's copybook. "Sorry. My fault."
She jumped down into a puddle and hurried back up the street, the wind trying to flip her umbrella inside out. Her phone buzzed.
MAM: Are you on the way? Don't forget you're minding your nephew at 6!!
She texted back Yes mam x without really looking.
Her head was still in that archive room.
Don't ask "What would Michael Collins do?" Ask "What can I do with what I know now?"
It had felt, stupidly, like the page was talking directly to her out of time.
You're being daft, she told herself, dodging a cyclist. He wasn't writing to a random researcher a hundred years on. He was writing to "the future" in the abstract.
Still.
By the time she reached the office—a bland concrete block near the quays—it was properly lashing.
The sign over the door said: Irish Institute for Public Policy & Planning. Inside: fluorescent lights, too much coffee, arguments about budgets.
"Morning," called Liam from the next desk as she shook herself like a wet dog.
"Afternoon, technically," she said, peeling off her coat. "Got ambushed by 1922."
He raised an eyebrow. "Again? We really need to get you a nice, safe topic. Like parking regulations."
"Don't joke," she said. "I've read the Parking Act. It's a crime scene."
She dropped into her chair, flipped open her laptop, and stared for a second at the half-finished policy paper on the screen.
Housing Futures: Beyond the Collins Model
The irony wasn't lost on her.
Modern Ireland—her Ireland—was obsessed with housing again.
The early 20th-century programmes Collins had pushed through were legendary: social housing estates with decent space standards, mixed-income blocks, tight rent control in post-war years. They'd given the country a head start that other places envied.
But then had come the 70s, 80s, 90s. Booms and busts. Deregulation. Global capital swooping in to buy up whole blocks of apartments as investments. The 2000s crash had hit hard. Reforms had followed. Now climate pressures and changing work patterns were reshaping things again.
"We can't just keep doing what we did in 1925," she'd argued at the last team meeting. "Different population, different economy, different planet."
Her boss had waved a hand. "Fine. You write me the roadmap, then. You're the one buried in Collins's old notes."
So here she was.
She opened her notebook instead of the document, flicked back to the lines she'd copied.
Idealism needs infrastructure.
Building decent homes is not charity; it's infrastructure.
Make it harder to do the worst things, easier to do the decent ones.
She stared at those for a long moment.
Her cursor on the screen blinked accusingly.
"All right, Big Fella," she muttered under her breath. "Let's see if you were as clever as you thought."
For a heartbeat, the air shimmered.
A tiny line of text flickered at the edge of her vision. She froze.
You have gained a new skill.
[Systems Thinking:] You see how housing, transport, climate, and economics interlock—allowing you to design policies that fix more than one problem at a time.
She blinked hard.
The text was gone.
"Too much coffee," she told herself firmly. "And too many marginal notes."
Still.
Her brain rearranged the problem in front of her.
Housing wasn't just housing.
It was commute times. Flood risks on the coast. Energy use. Childcare access. Mental health. The difference between someone feeling like they had a stake in society or like they were one rent rise away from disaster.
She yanked her document to the front and began to type.
By the time her boss wandered past, Saoirse had three pages of bullet points.
He leaned on the edge of her desk, sipping from a mug that dared Brexit to "Come at me bro".
"All right, O'Shea," he said. "Give me the gospel."
"Not gospel," she said. "Framework."
He groaned. "I walked into that."
She pushed her chair back, mind running briskly.
"Look," she said, grabbing a pen and the nearest notepad. "Collins's genius—one of them—was that he treated housing as part of a wider system. He linked it to transport, to schooling, to public health. We've drifted from that."
She drew four overlapping circles.
"Housing. Transport. Climate. Community."
In each, she scribbled quick notes.
"Housing that's cheap to heat but miles from jobs isn't actually affordable. Apartments built near stations that flood every five years are disasters waiting to happen. You know this," she added quickly, as he opened his mouth. "We all know it. But our policies and budgets still treat them like separate departments."
He nodded slowly, interest piqued.
"So what are you proposing?"
"A twenty-year integrated plan," she said. "Legally binding. Regional, not just national. We commit to specific targets: units built, emissions reduced, commute times capped. And—this is the important bit—we design the governance to survive governments."
He raised an eyebrow. "Meaning?"
"An independent Housing & Infrastructure Commission," she said. "Statutory footing. Appointment process that isn't just party hacks. Five-year rolling plans that must be debated in the Dáil but can't be ignored without a supermajority. Citizen assemblies feeding in at each stage so local communities don't just find out when the diggers arrive."
She paused, then added, "And a constitutional amendment that recognises the right to housing—not as a magic wand, but as a guiding principle. Courts can't build houses, but they can slap wrists when we drag our feet."
Her boss stared at the mess of scribbles.
"That's…" He searched for the word. "Ambitious."
"You told me to think beyond 1925," she said.
He snorted. "I meant tweak a few grant schemes, but sure, why not revolutionise governance while you're at it."
He walked away with her notes, shaking his head, but she'd seen the glint in his eyes.
He was already thinking about who they'd need to get onside. [Analysis]—if that was what this strange new sharpness in her thinking was—tagged his motives: part genuine public spirit, part desire to make the institute relevant, part sheer love of a big fight.
Good, she thought. Big fights get big things done.
She glanced at the ghost circles drawn on her pad and, unbidden, another thought surfaced.
This is what he meant.
Michael Collins hadn't written that note for her, not really. But he'd lived his whole life with the same question: Given what I know now, what can I change?
She lived in an Ireland he'd helped shape, facing problems he'd never imagined. Climate models, AI tools, global pandemics, rental apps.
She also lived in an Ireland where people still turned up at council meetings with homemade posters, where nurses still marched, where students still occupied lecture halls when fees went up.
History didn't end. It sprawled.
Her phone buzzed again.
MAM: Don't forget nephew!!! He has a project on "Irish heroes" 😂 maybe you can tell him about that Collins lad you're obsessed with
She smiled despite herself.
On impulse, she typed back:
SAOIRSE: I'll tell him about some nurses and planners too. Collins would be grand, but his head is big enough.
She hit send, then returned to her keyboard.
At the top of her draft report, she added a new line before the dry title.
We are not starting from scratch. We are inheriting a system built by people who believed Ireland could be better. Our task is to do the same, with our problems.
Too earnest? Maybe.
She left it in.
Outside, rain tracked down the office windows. On a half-finished rail extension somewhere west of the Shannon, engineers in high-vis jackets checked their plans. In a housing estate in Belfast, kids with mixed accents kicked a ball against a wall painted with a mural about climate justice instead of paramilitary logos. In a village in Mayo, a retired farmer grumbled about new wind turbines while cashing a dividend cheque from the local energy co-op.
Ireland, messy as ever, stumbled forward.
Somewhere in an archive box, the old copybook slept again.
If anyone had been around to hear it, they might have caught the faintest echo in the hum of servers and traffic and rain:
You have gained a new skill.
[Ongoing Project:] You understand now that a republic is never finished—allowing you to stop looking for final victories and start making useful, imperfect progress.
Saoirse didn't hear that, of course.
She just rolled her shoulders, cracked her knuckles, and kept typing.